Dr. Barak soon answered this question.
“In the spring of 1952, something very curious happened,” he said, his eyes twinkling with the glee of a professor with a captive and uninitiated audience. “A new scroll was found in Cave Three in the hills above Qumran, unlike any of the scrolls that had been found before. I was not part of the team that found it, but as a young research assistant, I had the extraordinary privilege of being part of the team that studied it. And believe me, no one had ever seen anything like this scroll.
“It was not written with ink on animal skins or parchments, as were the others. It was, instead, engraved on metal — on copper, to be precise. But whatever for? If the book of Isaiah—the Holy Scriptures, mind you — could be written on something so fragile as parchment, what message could the Copper Scroll possibly contain that was so precious it had to be engraved on metal to be preserved for the ages? This was the first big question we had but only one of many. Another was, how do we open the blasted thing? It was encrusted with nineteen hundred years of oxidation. It was so brittle we feared it might disintegrate in our hands. Indeed, unlike any of the other scrolls, it took us four years to figure out how to get it open.”
“So how did you?” asked Erin, leaning forward in her seat.
“Interesting, but not critical,” Barak replied. “I’ll explain that later, if you’d like. But the point is we did get it open, in the spring of 1956, and from there the mystery only deepened. You see, the language of the text was very odd. It wasn’t conventional Hebrew or the colloquial Aramaic of the day, but an obscure version of ancient Hebrew laced with Greek cryptograms, seemingly without purpose. As if that weren’t enough, the text itself bore no resemblance to other scrolls. It wasn’t a copy of the Jewish Scriptures, or a set of religious commentaries, or a journal of daily life in the religious community at Qumran like we’d found in the other scrolls. This only baffled us further.
“Nor was the text of the Copper Scroll even a narrative, as the others are. Instead, it contained sixty-four individual lines or entries, each of which seemed to take us forever to decipher. But as we did, a shock wave began to shake this elite team of archeologists, linguists, and cryptographers. For each entry described a cache of gold, silver, jewels, or ancient religious artifacts hidden in the surrounding hills. A hundred talents of gold here. Fifty talents there. Five hundred talents over there. And so forth. When we tallied it all up — line by line — and translated it into modern weights and measures, the total came to almost two hundred tons of treasure! We could hardly believe our eyes!”
“Was it real, or a legend?” asked Bennett, still unclear how any of this had anything to do with Mordechai’s death but captivated by the tale.
“Ah, that’s the question, isn’t it?” said Barak. “Some of the team immediately dismissed it all as ancient folklore. How could it be anything but? There was no way, they argued, that a band of monastic Jews living in the Judean wilderness during the first century could possibly have possessed nearly two hundred tons of gold and silver — one quarter of all the known gold and silver in the entire world at the time!
“But others on the team were convinced it was real. There were certainly massive quantities of gold and silver in Palestine at the time. Biblical and other historical records indicate that the ancient Hebrews had built up enormous reserves of gold and silver and other treasures over the years, all of which they stored in the Temple in Jerusalem. Second Chronicles 9 says: ‘The weight of the gold that Solomon received yearly was 666 talents, not including the revenues brought in by merchants and traders. Also all the kings of Arabia and the governors of the land brought gold and silver to Solomon.’ Now, just to put that into perspective, 666 talents is about twenty-five tons of gold and silver, and that came into the Temple treasury every year.”
“But wasn’t Solomon’s Temple destroyed by the Babylonians?” asked Erin. “And didn’t Nebuchadnezzer cart off all the treasure?”
“True,” said Barak. “But remember, seventy years later Nehemiah and Ezra were allowed to return from Babylon to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, restore the Temple, and bring back the treasures. They also took up an offering to resupply the Temple treasury, and in the process, Ezra collected 18,125 ounces of gold — about half a ton — and 100,000 ounces of silver — roughly three tons. Then Ezra chapter 7 notes that the Persian king Artaxerxes issued a decree authorizing that up to 120,000 ounces of silver — almost four tons — be given to the Israelites to rebuild ‘the house of the God of heaven.’”
“That’s a lot of treasure,” said Bennett.
“It certainly is,” Barak agreed. “And the treasures of the Second Temple only grew. King Herod, as you know, dramatically expanded the size of the Temple, and Jews annually brought enormous sums of gold, silver, and precious jewels into the Temple as part of their tithes and offerings to God. In fact, as you probably know, Jesus Himself spoke of the enormity of the Temple treasures in Matthew 23: ‘Woe to you, blind guides! You say, “If anyone swears by the temple, it means nothing; but if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath.” You blind fools! Which is greater: the gold, or the temple that makes the gold sacred?’
“Bottom line: everybody in Israel knew how great were the treasures of the Second Temple. What’s interesting to me is that in the years following Jesus’ crucifixion, the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem grew more and more worried that the Romans were going to destroy their Holy City and take the Temple treasures back to Rome, like the Babylonians had done with Solomon’s Temple. That’s what makes the dating of the Copper Scroll so intriguing.”
Natasha was on approach to Queen Alia International Airport, but no one else in the chopper seemed to notice or care.
“As best we can tell,” Barak continued, “the Copper Scroll was written in AD 68 or 69.”
“That’s just a year or two before the Romans burned Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple,” said Bennett.
“Exactly,” said Barak. “And that’s when our theory of the Copper Scroll began to take shape. What if the Temple priests had a premonition of what the Romans were about to do? What if they feared the Temple treasures would be lost forever if they did not act? What if they began to smuggle the treasures out of the Temple at night, in small batches, secreting them out of Jerusalem and burying them in the desert sands and the mountain caves to protect them from the coming apocalypse, from what some believed was the coming War of Gog and Magog?”
A moment later they were back on the ground, stretching their legs. The January air was cool. A slight breeze crossed the desert, and thick winter rain clouds formed overhead.
“Come,” Natasha said, directing them to a Land Rover parked on the edge of the tarmac. “We should go before the rains begin.”
They quickly departed the airport grounds and headed to a dusty hill in a suburb of Amman. To their left were the remains of a once-great Roman structure of some kind. Six enormous, ancient stone pillars stood side by side. The tallest two in the center were capped by ornate pieces of carved stone, forming an archway of sorts. But this held little interest for the Baraks. They were already making their way toward an unimpressive little building that seemed more like a small-town post office back in the U.S. than the Jordan Archaeological Museum, indicated by a large blue sign over the doorway.